The recently launched Steam Greenlight program has a problem with its signal-to-noise ratio, as Valve has been flooded with legitimate submissions as well as joke entries from the collection of comedian known as the internet. To combat this, they announce they are adding a one hundred dollar submission fee, which will be contributed to charity. Here's word:

Two things we’ve noticed so far. First, there are a ton of legitimate submissions that people want to see. Second, there is unfortunately a significant amount of noise and clutter being submitted, either as a joke or by fans not fully understanding the purpose of Greenlight.

So, with those things in mind, today we’ve made two updates to how Greenlight works.

The first update is a $100 fee for someone to post to Steam Greenlight. The proceeds will be donated to Child’s Play. We have no interest in making money from this, but we do need to cut down the noise in the system. (Note: Anyone who has already posted a submission to Greenlight will not have to retroactively pay for any existing submissions, but will need to do so for any future submissions.)

The second part of this update is to improve your window into Greenlight and help you find “your kind” of games. The next time you visit Steam Greenlight you’ll be shown a smaller, manageable list of games that you haven’t rated. This view is a mix of popular games and new games to Greenlight.

In the end, we’re very interested in maintaining an environment that is fair and beneficial to everyone involved, and one that fun and rewarding to join.

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$100 is a worthy fee just to be seen on Steam Greenlight right now. A buddy of mine is an independent developer, (Black Chicken Studio), that focuses on very niche titles. Getting his title onto to Steam Greenlight netted him enough interest for his game, Scheherazade, already to make back that $100 easy, even though he submitted Day 1. People saw his game, commented both negatively and positively, and a good amount of people even saved it to their favorites. Not talking large numbers here and most likely not enough to actually get on Steam, but far better than he could do on his own. The fact that Valve is donating the money to charity is just icing on the cake for what is essentially free advertising.

Now, I don't know how useful of an advertising and publicity outlet Greenlight will be in the future, but right now it is fairly good considering I even discovered a few titles that were already launched, I'm interested in, but never even heard of until Greenlight.

Also, Steam's old approval process was horrid. You either had to know someone at Valve, have a solid track record and titles on Steam already or prove yourself somewhere else first just to even get an e-mail back from them. Although I doubt it was official, unless you were pushing solid figures on other portals, Steam wouldn't even pay attention to your existence. Can't necessarily blame them though because I imagine the number of submissions they get are fairly high considering the current state of the Greenlight (minus the troll submissions).